For medium sized businesses contemplating making the move into the cloud, many questions rear their ugly heads and the answers at first glance may not seem entirely clear. However, a chat with Paul Goepfert from Pronto Software provides an excellent opportunity to answer the most pressing questions.

When subscribing to a cloud service, there are several key aspects to take into account to minimise disruption in case the service goes down.

The first one is to identify which of your software applications are most critical to your business. Look at the top three, five, or even 10 applications, and keep asking yourself: “What would we do if it stopped working?” until you arrive at a satisfactory answer. In some cases, the answer may be that the application is just too critical to be moved into the cloud and you would be better off sticking with an in-house system.

Some people think of “the cloud” as the Holy Grail for business software. The advantages of cloud services include outsourcing your IT infrastructure to experts and having unlimited access to applications wherever there is an Internet or wide-area network connection.

Moving applications to the cloud allows companies to focus on adding value through their own products and services, rather than wasting time worrying about their IT infrastructure.